I collect dates
as if they were door
handles. Seek the perfectly shaped one
to build a saudade
life around. Your birth, or death,
or the afternoon you got divorced—
it could be one of those.
But I choose to lock
my eyes on a calendar
with the first day of school
circled in red. Tuesday,
September 2nd, 1980. You looked right
in red. Let the vintage ink
smear. Now I will too.
This Noguchi sculpture encased
in glass on the departures level inside the San Francisco Airport soothes
my incurable longing
for what those Big Sur rocks would not release. That he could have been
my soul mate doesn’t matter—he’s been gone
since I was a young woman. That this other creator
of darkest beauty could be is
a lie I tell myself
to keep my feet from straying
off the cliff side path. I believe in
an art that mates soul to soul for a moment. And that is enough
to fly home on.
Saudade isn’t saudade
if it is satisfied. When she least expects it,
other dreams come
into focus under the lights. Dust
of desire becomes frenzied
particles she won’t try to collect. She’s reaching
over the fence with its crumbling limestone
foundation to touch another’s—
carefully stacked against the wrought-iron grille.
She won’t see
the Atlantic tomorrow,
but she’ll get very close.
She seeks a childhood face
along the East Bank, diverted and spilled onto
an empty road, old railroad
tracks framing its riverside.
That this widening band of water flowing south
could be the same river
as the tiny channel
she waded through yesterday up north,
that this unsalted navigational pulse
could reckon with her North Atlantic bias
could all be a signal
calling her to pause here
behind a brick building in an old rail yard
(only a slice of river visible) to see how
no other word, even in this midst,
besides saudade will do.
In English. The sea is a false promise
of return,
ebb and flow,
rhythmic come and go,
the Portuguese fisherman’s saudade,
the Korean cane cutter’s han,
the American salesman building a heartland,
longing for salt and brine
he has never known.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 